The Parable Is Not Explained

One of my favorite lines from rabbinic literature—borrowed from Parables in Midrash, David Stern’s masterful study of sacred imagination in the classical world—is simply: “The parable is not explained.” I’ve used this phrase too much over the years, both in and out of context, because it says so much with so little.

This week, suspended between sorrow for friends in Boulder and joy for my daughter’s wedding in Jerusalem, I found myself living inside one of those unexplained parables—one that unfolded in the back seat of a cab.

Rushing to Tel Aviv after Shabbat to meet friends, I hailed a ride through Gett. The driver happened to live just a few buildings away from mine, and almost as soon as I clicked in my seatbelt, we began a wide-ranging conversation that stretched across Highway One: Islam, Aristotle, metaphysics, morality. Then came his story—a parable, really—about a mule.

A respected man’s mule dies, and a cunning passerby offers to bury it. He convinces the grieving man to tell others that a saint lies in the mule’s grave. Pilgrims arrive. Offerings pour in. The man becomes rich. When I asked the driver what it meant, he shrugged: “Maybe we’re all either corrupt or fools.”

Eventually, I asked the inevitable: “What do you think will happen here—in Israel?” Then he smiled, knowingly: “It’s written in the holy book. We will rule.”

I pressed him. What about reason? Philosophy? The power of interpretation? Can’t people of faith read our texts with humility, even irony—especially when so much suffering is at stake?

“No,” he replied. “There is nothing to be discussed when it comes to the word of God.”

I tried one last time. “But what about the mule? The trickery, the blind belief, the consequences? Isn’t that a warning?”

He shook his head. “That’s just a cab driver’s story. Not the holy text.”

We parted ways. I disagreed with him deeply. And still, as he drove off and the distance between us widened, I felt the ache of it—the irreconcilable gap between inherited belief and humanistic striving. The parable lingered, and, as is often the case with our most important stories:
The parable was not explained.